11 ms·

As someone who's had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english and german, I'd say german has a steeper initial learning curve, but it becomes easier later, wh

• B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  > and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. I wish they would pound that forcefully into the grammarians torturing children in school. I look at the grammar they teach, and I think someone got paid to make stuff up.
  • jacobr1 5y ago
    In the US, my understanding is that english grammar is no longer taught in public schools.
• quercusa 5y ago
  > languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all,the faster you will advance. In the first day of Koine Greek class, the instructor asked who had programming experience. She made a point of stressing, as she would again, that unlike computer languages, human languages show no signs of design, and not to spend any time looking for it. It was good advice.
  • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    Well... not that the advice isn't solid, and she's a good teacher for driving this point into the programmer student's minds. But saying no sign is a bit extreme, there is some level of design in any natural language. Icelandic has a committee that decides on new words. Instead of using foreign loan words they largely make up their own new Icelandic words when needed for new concepts. In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English. Chinese grammar is super simple and logical. I don't know if this is due to design but it wouldn't surprise me if there had been some reforms in the past. Especially since standard Chinese used to be a somewhat artificial literary language. And speaking of writing: All alphabets are designed of course. Korean is a great example for a really clever and logical design. The reading and writing in turn will have had an influence on the way we think and speak, since it formalized and standardized languages.
    • meowface 5y ago
      >In German the spelling is centrally planned and gets reformed every other year. Which is why German words are mostly spelled as they're pronounced, as opposed to English. As a native English speaker, this is definitely a big plus. I've had German friends who've regularly expressed frustration that there's often no real rhyme or reason or pattern to either English spelling or pronunciation; you just have to memorize it. (Though I could largely say the same of German and French noun genders, even if there are some patterns that are somewhat [but not entirely] consistent.) Meanwhile, spelling and pronunciation in German seems to be pretty bijective. If you know how an unfamiliar word is pronounced, you can generally accurately know how it's spelled, and if you how an unfamiliar word is spelled, you can generally accurately know how it's pronounced.
      • jtsuken 5y ago
        English does not have a concept of THE right pronunciation. If you try to change the spelling of a "word", you'd first have to get a number of former British colonies to agree on how to pronounce it. Is it Woed, Worrrd, Woid, Waed? Germany, after losing both world wars only needs to deal with Switzerland and Austria to agree on updated spelling of something.
• andensande 5y ago
  The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted). Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance, (1) I am walking to the shops. is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)? (2a) I live in Berlin. (2b) I'm living in Berlin. To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin. There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult. A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot: (3) She would have had to have been being watched. Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.
  • User23 5y ago
    One of my favorites is adjective order. Pink riding big elephant just sounds wrong to a native speaker, but almost none could tell you why.
    • quercusa 5y ago
      https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...
      • irrational 5y ago
        This explains the most common order, but not why that is the order. What are the underlying rules that determine that is the best order?
• msrenee 5y ago
  Absolutely agree. I'm a native English speaker who has dipped their toes in Spanish, Russian, and German. Spanish vocab was easy except for some deceptively similar words with very different meanings. Grammar came fairly easy in spite of the differences with English. Russian grammar and vocab plus the different alphabet were incredibly intimidating, but the different declensions became familiar very quickly. I was familiar with conjugation from Spanish, so that was just a bit of memorization. I like how clear the alphabet and spelling are. Once you learn how to sound things out, you're good to go besides very few exceptions. Everything is very regular, there's just a lot of tenses and moods to get acquainted with. Perfective and imperfective verbs are still something I have to learn on a word-by-word basis. German grammar was easy except for the different cases. I'd already been exposed to cases with Russian, so I don't know why it's so much harder for me in German. Maybe because I expected it to be closer to English. It's weird the way I can listen to a sentence in German and it feels like I know what they're saying, but if I try to translate it, I don't have a clue. I don't think you can really class languages by difficulty. You just have to immerse yourself in each. Even in those with recent spelling and grammar revisions, getting the ear for it and using it is the key.
• Buldak 5y ago
  I had a similar thought when I studied French in school, i.e. that I could explain a lot more about French grammar technically, explicitly, than I could about my native English. This sort of example occurs to me whenever someone insists that you don't really understand something unless you can clearly explain it.
• tasogare 5y ago
  > trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration Not really. Language as a system is pretty well understood. What appears to be exceptions or non-sense when learning a language often have a simple explanation when looking at the evolution of the said language.
• hilbert42 5y ago
  "Regarding Twain's complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is." Oh how absolutely true this statement is. As an adult, I find myself deconstructing and atomizing every aspect of the language I'm learning and then reconstructing it bit by bit into English. Not only does this approach slow one's progress down to a crawl but also it limits one's fluency even after one has some basic understanding of the language. [Incidentally, I found this to be more of a problem with French than with German even though I was taught French at a much younger age.] From my observations, I have noticed that I'm not alone in having adopted this approach, especially so for some of us with a technical bent. It seems to me that we adopt the same analytical approach to learning a language as we do to when learning a technical skill or analyzing some physical phenomenon. Clearly this is the wrong when it comes to learning languages but it's a very difficult habit break. In a similar vein, I recall getting somewhat annoyed when trying to learn Morse code and making no progress. Whilst I was told never to analyze the individual dots and dashes of characters but nevertheless I still did and it was not until I broke this habit (with some difficulty mind you) and that I listened only to the rhythm of the sound of each character that I started to make progress. Obviously, learning a language is a much more difficult exercise than learning Morse code but the same rules apply in both instances. I recall several decades ago attending a lecture by Noam Chomsky and he made a comment that I have never forgotten as it resonated with me then and ever since. That was that he—a world renown linguist—had difficulty in learning languages—and he cited words to the effect 'that a new language can waft down the corridors of MIT and that most of his colleagues catch it with ease as it passes by—except for him'. Even at the time of the lecture, I could not help but think that he like me dissects and atomizes a language in ways his colleagues have learned not to do (but perhaps when you're a linguist that approach may be useful—after all, Chomsky is very famous and his colleagues are seemingly very much less so).
• jamil7 5y ago
  > languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance This is the point I came to with German and was at a level where I could start speaking it (poorly but enough to be understood) all the time with native speakers. I read up on some things from time to time but mostly ignore a lot of the theory as a child would and just refuse to switch to English as much as possible. It's probably slower this way but it's been one of the few ways I've actually been able to be consistent with practice.
• berkes 5y ago
  I'm from a small Dutch bordertown and my first language is a dialect that is part German, part Dutch (and some French) (Limburgish). In German class, away from that bordertown, outside where the dialect is common, I never paid attentention. Teachers would require me te learn tables filled with exceptions, weird strings of words (mit nach bei..) etc. I simply refused. I often didn't bother to go to class. Just using the Fingerspitzengefühl that comes with the part-German dialect, was adequate. 7/10 on my exams. So certainly not fluent or even good. At the diploma-handout, the German teacher told me she did not want to, but was required to give me that grade (why a teacher would disclose this to an 18/yo is beyond me, though. There certainly was spite). Point is: even sideloading a language from a young age helps learn it. At least for n=1.
• tilolebo 5y ago
  That has been my experience too. I was always an average foreign language student, until I started to learn German living in Berlin and to speak English at work. Now I'm fluent in both languages. I forgot most of the German rules I learned during my first months in Berlin taking crash courses. I just know sentence structures because I heard them and used them so often. Like a child, really.
• haecceity 5y ago
  Children learn language by learning phrases and the correspondence of those phrases to things around them or things that happen around them. Rules are learnt later. Learning language is harder when you don't have parents to play the language game with you. Maybe something like aidungeon could be a language learning tool??
• rvieira 5y ago
  > languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance Except Esperanto, surely ;)